Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal.
Douglas AdamsRead
We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often 'crash' when we tried to use them.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects how everyday objects, like chairs, evolve in our perception from technological innovations to mere commonplace items over time.
Douglas Adams highlights the journey of technological development as something that, once established, fades into the background of everyday life. We often forget the complexity and thought that went into creating simple objects because they become so integrated into our daily routine that we take them for granted. Adams reminds us that even the most ordinary items have a history of innovation and adaptation behind them.
Themes
TechnologyChairsInnovationPerceptionEveryday Life
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about innovation in design, one could use this quote to illustrate how common items evolve over time.
More from Douglas Adams
All quotes →"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?" "Ask a glass of water."
Douglas AdamsRead
Protect me from knowing what I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to know about. Amen. [...] Lord, lord, lord. Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.
Douglas AdamsRead
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
Douglas AdamsRead
What the computer in virtual reality enables us to do is to recalibrate ourselves so that we can start seeing those pieces of information that are invisible to us but have become important for us to understand.
Douglas AdamsRead
We are stuck with technology when all we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.
Douglas AdamsRead
Similar quotes
Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.
Eric S. RaymondRead
The perfect example of Darwinism is what technology has done to businesses.
Charlie MungerRead
If the Net becomes the center of the universe, which is what seems to be happening, then the dizzying array of machines that will be plugged into it will virtually guarantee that the specifics of which chip and which operating system you've got will be irrelevant.
Marc AndreessenRead
There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the Internet is that it's extremely hard to block anything - extremely hard. You'll never get perfect blocking.
Bill GatesRead
As the amount of inputs go up, as the number of people and ideas that clamor for attention continue to increase, we do what people always do: we rely on the familiar, the trusted and the personal. The incredible surplus of digital data means that human actions, generosity and sacrifice are more important than they ever were before.
Seth GodinRead
Our whole role in life is to give you something you didn't know you wanted. And then once you get it, you can't imagine your life without it. And you can count on Apple doing that.
Tim CookRead